The Pulaski citizen. [volume] (Pulaski, Tenn.) 1866-current, 1887-02-10

name on her ! scordS as member. AT her
affairs 1 repen5ed. At her sacraments I be-
lieved. In her service let me die. From her
doors let me be buried. O, church of Godl
Thou home of the rightcousl Thou harbor
from tclnpestI Thou refuge for the wearyl
Thou Lighthouse of many nations! Thou
type Of Heaven! l could kiss thy very dust
with ecstasy Of affection.
Fer her lly tears shall fall,
For her my prayers ascend,
To her my tolls and cares be given
Till tolls and cares shall end.
"Perfumed smoke" says Solomon, in the
words following my text. Not like the fumes
coughcd up from the throat of a steam pipe,
o. pc ;soned with the gases of chemical fac
tories, or floating in black wrath from the
coniIagration of homesteads, or sulphurous
fro:n blazing batteries, but sweet as q burn
iag grove Of cinnamon or jungle of sassafras
Or the odors of a temple censer. "Hho is
this that conleth out of the wilderness like
pillars of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and
trankinccnse?' Hear it, men and women
everywhere that the advance of the genuine
church of Christ means peace for all nations.
Victor Hugo, in his book entitled "Ninety-
three" says Nothing calmer than smoke,
but nothing more startling. There are peace
ful smokes, and there are evil ones. The thick
ness and color of a line Of smoke make the
whole difference between war and peace, be-
tween fraternity and hatred. The whole
happiness of man or his complete misery is
sometimes expressed in this thin vapor which
the wind scatte1s at will" The great French
man was right, but | go further and say that
as the kingdom of God advances like pillars
of smoke, the black volumes belching from
batteries of war and pouring out from port
boIo ,/,Fc cl,i Will fro he
A distinguished gentleman of the late war
told me recently that Abraham Lincoln
proposed to avoid our civil conflict by
and setting them free. He calculated
what would be a reasonable price for
them. and, when the number of millions of
dollars that would be required for such pur-
pose was announced, the proposition was
secuted, and the north would not have made
the offer and the south would not have ac-
cepted it if made. "But," said my military
friend @the war went on, and just the num-
ber of millions of dollars that Mr.. Lincoln
calculated would have been enough to make
a reasonable purchase of all the slaves were
spent in war, besides all the precious lives
that were hurled away in the two hundred
and fifty battles" In other words, there
ought to be some other way for men to settle
their controversies without wholesale
butchery.
The church of God will yet become the
arbiter of nations If the world would allow
it, it could to-day step i'll between Germany
and France and settle the trouble about
Alsace and Lorraine, and between Russia
and Bulgaria. and between England and her
antagonists, and between all the other ma
tions that are flying at each others throats,
and command peace and disband armies and
harness for the plow the war horses now be-
ing hitched to ammunition wagons or saddled
for cavalry charge. That time must come, or
| through the increased facility for shooting
men and blowing up cities and whelming
| hosts to instant death, SO that we can kill a
regiment easier than we could once kill
| a company, and kill a brigade easier
than we could once kill a regiment, the
patent Offices of the world more busy than
ever in recognizing new enginery of destruc-
| ton, the human race will after while go
fighting with one arm, and hobbling with
one foot, and stumbling along with one eye,
and some ingenious inventor, inspired of the
archangel of all mischief, will contrive
machine that will bore hole to the earth's
center, and some desperate nation will throw
into that hole enough dynamite to blow this
hulk of planet into fragments, dropping
like meteoric stones on surrounding stellar
habitations
But this shall not be, for whatever else 1
let go l hang on to my Bible, which tells me
that the blacksmith's shop shall yet come to
It's grandest use, when the warrior and the
| husbandman shall enter it side by side, and
| the soldier shall throw into its bank of fires
his sword, and the farmer shall pick it up q
plowshare, and the straightest spear shall be
! bent into crook at each end and then cut
| in two, and what was one spear shall be two
pruning forks. Down with Moloch and up
with Christ! Let no more war horses eat out
| of the manger where Jesus was born.
Peace! Forever roll off the sky the black
pillars of smoke from the Marengos and Sa1a-
mancas and Borodinos and Sedans and Get
tysburgs of earthl And right after them,
roll into the heavens the peaceful vapors from
the chimneys of farm houses and asylums and
churches and capitals of Christian nations,
| and as the sunlight strikes through these
vapors they will write in letters of jet and
gold all over the sky from horizon to zenith:
"Glory } God i'll the highest, and on earth
peace, good will to men!" Then let all the
men-of-war fire a broadside and all tho forts
thunder forth resounding volley, and the
earth be girded with the cannonade over the
final victory of the truth.
While thinking of these things l looked out
from my window and the wind was violently
blowing And I saw from many chimneys
the smoke tossed in the air and whirled in
great velocity, volume after volume, fold
| after fold, and carried on the swift wind
were the great pillars of smoke. And helped
by Solomon in the text / saw the speed
of the church symbolized. Do you realize
the momentum the church of God is
under2 Why, the smoke of a chimney on the
top of Mount Washington when the wind is
blowing sixty miles the hour, is slow as
compared with the celerity of good influences.
For fifty mine centuries the devil had it his
own way among the nations. Nearly
all the great missionary movements
have been started within the century,
and see what one century has done
to recover the world from fifty-nine cen
turies of devastation. What great revivals!
What mighty churches What saved mil
lions! What advancing civilization! In all
the United States, Great Britain, Ireland,
France, Germany, Italy full freedom to wor-
ship God according to conscience. Along the
coasts of China, Japan and Africa the bat
teries are planted which are to take all these
empires for God and civilization. From the
ruins of Babylon and Assyria and Nineveh
and the valleys of the Nile confirmations
have been exhumed proving to all fair
minded men that the Bible is the
truest book ever written. The myth
ologies of Egypt were found to have
embodied in them the knowledge of mans
expulsion from Paradise, and the sacrifice of
great emancipation. Moses account of the
creation, corroborated by the hammer OF
Christian geologiss; the Oldest profane
writer's like Hiromus, Helanicus and Bcrosus
confirming the Bible account of ancient
longevity; Tacitus and Pliny confirming the
Bible accounts Of destroyed Sodom and Go
morrah; Tacitus and Porphyry telling the
samo story Of Christ as Matthew and Luke
told; Macrobius telling of the massacre OF
children in Bethlehem, and Phlcgon sketch
ing the darkness at the cruciffxion. 1t is de
inonstrated to oil honest men that it is
not SO certain that William Cullen Bryant
wrote Ihanatopsis or Longfellow wrote
1Iiawatha as that God by the hand of prophet
, and apostle wrota the Bible. All the wist